"She Wrote"

By: Lanisha Porter

I know to you, you see yourself as an innocent guy simply using confidence to fit the cultural idea of maleness which secures your masculinity to be considered a man in society.

MI·SOG·Y·NY1) dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.PRED·A·TOR1) an animal that naturally preys on others.2) a person or group that ruthlessly exploits others.

You may have a way with some women but this shouldn’t give you reason to believe all women are the same. With continuous success comes confidence so I understand why you are confident given the women you have entirely had your way with. But I want you to diversify your palette. Please stop painting the picture of women with one stereotypical broad stroke because you’ve been successful with a small subset of the female population.

Every woman is her own unique make; she comes with a particular set of thoughts, core values that are kindred to her life experience, personal energies and vibrations that spill over into other people’s lives, distinct physical features, and if you’re lucky a catalog of wisdom from hard lessons learned. No two women are ever the same in matter, space, time, or existence. And being overly confident allows you to miss this very obvious fact. Having too much confidence allows you to bypass her as a person and only recognize her as something that should be conquered for your own ego. This is extremely selfish. This is also very dehumanizing to women. It hints to the idea that you believe we are disposal—to be thrown away after you’ve lived out your series of pleasures through us. Women are people, believe it or not. And as women we are very much capable of making our own decisions concerning their lives, bodies, and selves so if you are curious about what we want…simply ask us…don’t act in manipulative ways to advance your own personal agenda. Stop being presumptuous thinking you’ve got every woman figured out. Do not try to read body language or even interpret whats not being said as an invitation. I once was told by a man—well, a boy—after asking him why he was so confident that he could have sex with any girl he wanted to, and he replied, “It’s just been something I’ve been able to do with countless others. I don’t understand why [certain girls] think [they] would be any different.”

He’s been able to get his rocks off with any girl he has wanted to in the past and it doesn’t make any sense to him why certain girls had the confidence to think that they would be any different. Wow. Talk about disrespect for women. And the scariest thing is he honestly hadn’t realized the magnitude of this insult. It slipped out so un-reflectively; so easily; so un-remorsefully. It was deeply ingrained in his psyche and he spoke it with the utmost conviction.

It’s in this moment I realized the devastating truth that some men still fail to see women as their equals. That some men are very much bred into being ruthless predators seeing women as nothing more than potential successions to their sexual pleasures. It’s in this moment that he confirmed a harsh truth for me that I didn’t want to admit to—society is indeed a patriarchy. Women continuously have our willpower challenged and when we say no men often only see this as the beginning of “negotiation.”I wrote this piece for all the boys out there who have yet to mature into appreciating the woman. Though I don’t understand how such societal ills like misogyny prevail when most males have been nursed at the knee of a great grandmother, grandmother, mother, aunty, or even sister, I will continue to push back against it. I will push back because I do not want my daughter to someday grow up in a world where men try to batter her spirit and negotiate her into being a “countless other.” But instead of teaching my daughter how to avoid men like that, I challenge myself to confront men like that. I challenge men to terminate these selfish ideologies. I challenge men not to pass these ideologies on to young boys. I’m being proactive instead of reactive.

What a woman does with you is her personal choice; what a woman also chooses not to do with you is also her own personal choice. If you get lucky, this doesn’t necessarily seal the deal that every other woman will react the same way. Assuming that you have all women figured out makes you colorblind to the women who exist brilliantly in different hues. Assuming that all women are the same shows you fail to respect plurality and significant differences. The biggest problem here, I might add, with assuming is that you fail to see her and generalize her to be just an interchangeable piece to a collective whole. I know to you, you see yourself as an innocent guy simply using confidence to fit the cultural idea of maleness which secures your masculinity to be considered a man in society. But what I’m telling you is that your hyper-confidence oozes out quite poorly making you look like a misogynistic and selfishpredator…and that’s nothing to be confident in, buddy. I do not write this in bitterness or out of spite. But I pen this in cultural awareness of this predatory system. I'd much rather gobble and spit out a man while schooling him with this knowledge on respecting women, than to be preyed upon by one who doesn't realize.